Bob Hawke

Robert James Lee "Bob" Hawke (9 December 1929-) was Prime Minister of Australia from 11 March 1983 to 20 December 1991, succeeding Malcolm Fraser and preceding Paul Keating. He was leader of the Australian Labor Party from 1983 to 1991.

Biography
Bob Hawke was born in Bordertown, South Australia in 1929, and he studied economics and law at Perth and as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, joining the Australian Labor Party in 1946. He worked as a research scholar at the Australian National University from 1956 to 1958, and he then became a research scholar for the Australian Council of Trade Unions (1958-1969) before becoming its president in 1970. He joined the national executive of the Labor Party in 1971, but did not become a member of the House of Representatives until 1980. He joined the party's parliamentary executive, and on 5 March 1983 was unanimously elected to the party's leadership. Succeeding Malcolm Fraser as Prime Minister in 1983, he based his long tenure on a careful maintenance of an internal balance of power within Labor between broad left, center-left, and right. Anxious to appease business, he achieved a government-sponsored compromise between business leaders and trade unions, inaugurating a six-year-long spell of industrial peace. Criticized for being less radical than the Whitlam government, his pragmatic policies effectively seized the middle ground in Australian politics, which was maintained by Paul Keating after him and which ensued Labor's long tenure in office. He was helped by a dramatic economic recovery from 1983 to 1985, though his liberalization of the banking system caused a massive increase in Australia's private foreign debt. A renewed decline in economic growth from the late 1980s, and increasing hostility to his long grip on power eventually led to his replacement by Keating.